In the current practice of medicine it is not uncommon for injectable, especially intramuscular or subcutaneously administered, medicaments to be prescribed for administration by the patient himself or herself. It is important for such patients to be able to ascertain the applicability of a particular medicinal or pharmaceutical, prepackaged in a syringe for his or her treatment. The identification and/or testing and/or clearance of prefilled medicinal syringes is also important for pharmacists, hospital personnel, care givers and others involved in the chain of distribution and administration of medicinals by syringes.
For the purposes of the invention the syringe will be understood to be provided with some form of machine readable labelling or coding, indicating the contents of the syringe and, preferably, which can be effectively read only if the syringe has not been tampered with, previously used or refilled. For that purpose a device capable of reading the coding on the syringe can serve for the purposes of the invention.
As a general matter, prepackaged medication in the form of a syringe is widely used by diabetics and patients with other ailments and for these patients a similar level of security and reliability that the medication is proper, is required as has been the case for some time for medicaments in the form of drops or tablets. In such cases, the medicament or the package has been color-coded or the tablets have been of particular shapes all designed to assure the patient that he or she is taking the correct medication. That has not been the case up to now where the medicament has been prepackaged in a syringe. True syringes or other packaging have been labelled, but once the packaging material has been removed, it has not generally been possible to reliably determine in rapid manner whether the particular syringe contains a particular medicament, is the proper syringe for administration, etc.